Today marks Armistice Day, the 1918 surrender of Germany that ended hostility on the Western Front in World War I.
It also is known as Veteran’s Day in the US, thanks to sentiment from Kansas, as I have written before.
Poppies are used for remembrance in reference to one of the most heavily contested areas of Europe, Flanders, which sits between French, German and British control. The flowers grew all around the battlefields and expanding cemeteries of Belgium.
A poem called “In Flanders Fields” was written by Canadian Colonel John McCrae while fighting there and published in 1915:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Poster from the Canadian War Department
The reference to crosses is not universal for more reasons than one might expect. Today the German news points out that some of the dead are treated differently from the other casualties in Flanders.
The Langemark cemetery is the final resting place of 44,294 German soldiers. More than half of them are buried in one mass grave, the Kameraden Grab, their names etched on large dark plaques running alongside the site.
[Andre de Bruin, a World War I guide and founder of Over The Top Tours] points to rows of gravestones that lie flat on ground, explaining: “Belgium imposed very strict restrictions on German memorials. Headstones were not allowed to stand, not like those of the Commonwealth soldiers and there were many other rules that applied only to Germans.”
There were hundreds of burial sites of German soldiers after 1918 but in the 1950s, Belgium ordered that the bodies be regrouped in no more than four sites, of which Langemark is one.
“It was probably done out of hatred for what happened, especially during World War II when Belgium was occupied. They even forbade the use of crosses above the headstones,” de Bruin said.
